Belgrade city hall attacked after alleged election fraud
Protesters in the Serbian capital attempt to storm the building after voting ‘irregularities’
PROTESTERS in Serbia smashed windows and tried to force their way into Belgrade’s city hall as anger over alleged fraud in last week’s election boiled over.
Riot police fought back crowds with tear gas and arrested dozens of protestors as they tried to break through the doors into the city hall on Sunday.
Thousands took to the streets of the Serbian capital again yesterday, bringing city centre traffic to a standstill with roadblocks, ahead of a larger protest planned for last night.
Some of them carried posters saying “We are hungry for democracy and fed up with dictatorship” and “We will defend our vote”. Others chanted “Vucic is Putin”, likening Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic to the authoritarian Russian leader.
Mr Vucic’s party said it had secured a commanding victory in the Dec 17 general election. But international observers – including representatives from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe – reported “irregularities”, including “vote buying” and “ballot box stuffing”.
Serbian police said yesterday that at least 38 people were detained on Sunday night. Eight police officers were injured on Sunday, Ivica Ivkovic, a police spokeswoman, said.
Some of the detainees now face charges of inciting “violence change of constitutional order” as authorities interpreted the protests as an attempt to overthrow the government.
Mr Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party last weekend won about 46 per cent of the vote, with Serbia Against Violence, a group of pro-european parties, trailing behind with 23 per cent.
The ruling party also claimed victory in local elections in Belgrade, where opposition groups claimed ethnic Serbs had been bussed in from Bosnia to vote illegally in the capital to sway the results in favour of the current government.
Mr Vucic, Serbia’s president, derided Sunday’s protests as an attempt to stage a coup, claiming the West has been inciting the opposition.
Russia’s ambassador to Belgrade told Russian media yesterday Mr Vucic has “irrefutable evidence” that the West is stoking the protests, as the Kremlin sought to portray widespread discontent with Mr Vucic’s heavy-handed policies as a Western plot.
Serbia, which historically maintains close ties with Russia, was one of the few European countries not to back Western sanctions against the Kremlin over the invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the country’s Russia ties, Mr Vucic still says he is committed to joining the European Union.
Opposition politicians vowed to contest the election results. Some of them, like Marinika Tepic, a member of Serbia Against Violence, have been on hunger strike since the results were announced.
Borko Stefanovic, an opposition MP, yesterday said Mr Vucic was out of touch with reality, calling him a “lonely, small man on top of the Himalayas”.
“We will resist theft of the votes,” he told the TVN1 channel, warning that the president “won’t get away” with using violence against protesters.
Serbia’s opposition movement, which spearheaded the country’s biggest protests since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic two decades earlier, has been energised by a wave of public outrage after a series of shootings in early May left 18 people dead.
Protesters rallied several weekends in a row this spring and summer against what they believe is a deep-seated culture of violence fanned by the government and pro-government media.
Critics have accused Mr Vucic, a populist leader, of backsliding on reforms aimed at helping the country towards EU membership and increasingly expanding control over media and state institutions.
‘We are hungry for democracy and fed up with dictatorship ... We will defend our vote’